Open WiFi hotspots are everywhere, but their use is often limited by legal and …

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WiFi is everywhere, even in Prague panelaks, where I faced the dilemma common to every traveler with a laptop: to leech or not to leech? See, from our flat at the edge of the city, my wife and I discovered a range of WiFi signals coming from the gray apartment block next door. Most were secured, but a single network was tantalizingly open. The options were stark; as renters, DSL was out of the question, and although dial-up access could be had for free (from the ISP), you paid a per-minute charge (to Český Telecom) that quickly became ruinous. Now, I know that most terms of service for broadband connections include a provision that the connection not be shared beyond a user's house, but I hadn't signed any such agreement. And, since most Czech broadband plans are paid for by the month and not by the megabyte, we weren't running up anyone's bill. So we connected—for two months.

I'm happy to say that no came pounding on our door in the middle of the night to haul us off to in handcuffs to Ruzyne, but we were working in an ethical and legal gray zone. Here in the US, it's a common issue that confronts the business traveler on a daily basis, but it is potentially problematic. For instance, you may remember the widely reported story about the Florida man who went to jail for his surreptitious use of someone's open WiFi connection. Local laws, such as this proposed one from the enlightened state of New York, could make it illegal for users to leave the routers open to others. (It's all for security—well, security and the children. Identity theft and child porn are the usual boogeymen here.)

In this increasingly rigid climate, it's always interesting to hear from the other side, in this case ethics columnist Jeffrey Seglin. Seglin is obviously not the first to make the argument that using open WiFi networks is acceptable, but it is a sign of the times when the issue appears in a syndicated column across the country. Here's a taste:

"While I suppose that an argument could be made that you should never use what you don?t pay for, I don?t think this would apply here - and I?m not even sure that I agree with the broad sentiment. Unless it is made clear to users tapping into wireless connections that they must agree to certain conditions before proceeding, they have not breached any ethical mandate by logging on in any way that they legally can."

There are other ethical considerations, of course, such as whether you should alert your neighbor about his open network and see if he minds your use of it. How much bandwidth is too much to use? Are you causing your neighbor to inadvertently violate the terms of service he signed, and could this have legal repercussions for him? Using wide-open WiFi seems fine to us at the Orbiting HQ, but just because you're an anonymous user doesn't mean you're entitled to behave like a total cad (defined as downloading a gig of porn through BitTorrent over your neighbor's wireless link). Where are the lines of courtesy and responsibility to be drawn?